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Filter 79 vetted Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) reviews and ratings
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June 11, 2020
Episerver CMS is primarily used as a tool, in conjunction with Episerver Commerce, to provide content, information, and products to our bicycling customers. Episerver CMS provides page and block formats in which our marketing department formulates content for consumers and the back-end CMS the tooling necessary to execute. The CMS system is primarily used by our content management team, associated with our marketing department, and solves our need to have a system accessible to the less technical members of our staff.
- Allows for easy content updating by less technical members
- Provides avenues for improving and customizing the underlying system
- Executes quickly for fast rendering to end-users
- A more tightly integrated E-Commerce set of tools
- Improvement of the back-end runtime speed
- More out of the box visualization options for interface development
Episerver CMS is used in the whole organization. We have around 200 editors. It solves the overall communication for students, employees, and visitors. The solution has many integrations with other systems for example education information, jobs, student record information. It solves many problems for both users and editors. For example, we use Episerver for creating welcome letters for new students. Previously this was done manually with pdf:s, tables, and HTML pages. This has saved a lot of time for the editors but it also gives the students a better experience. We have also created a student web that collects student records, courses, schema, etc. in one place. This makes it very easy for the student to find information and it has reduced questions to our service department with 30 %.
- Edit pages and blocks
- Episerver FIND integration
- Stability of the platform
- Faster in edit mode
- Clean up the admin mode
- Improve epi forms
We are developing Episerver solutions for our customers. It's usually used by the whole organization but represented by a small group of editors. We allways work from a user perspective. We want to increase KPI, increase ROI, and have happy users for our customers. The problems or possibilities depend on our customers' business areas, but we always feel that we can tune Episerver to solve our problems.
- Content management, versioning, publish workflows
- Language handlring, setup for enterprise companies
- Continues product updates
- Active community
- SEO features
- Support for enterprise companies that are using bulk publish with "Projects"
- Redirect support, 301
- Accessibility features
June 11, 2020
We are using Episerver for all of our sites on the Polaris Platform. It's used by the front end and ecommerce solutions/teams. It addresses how to manage multiple sites with content and distribute that content at a rapidly changing pace. We utilize over 30 brands and each site has it's own flavor/flair that Episerver helps support. We are also looking at capitalizing Insight Profiles with time to improve our purchase utilization.
- Content Management
- Development Documentation
- Multi-environment Testing/development
- Default settings get reset/not easily managed
- Support when there are defects is slow
- Easier way to search through large chunks of content
Episerver is widely used in our organization, and we are using it to provide services to b2b customers (large building companies) and b2c customers (bathrooms) and for internal users (sales material, product data).
- Easy to use, low learning curve
- Customization is easy
- World class product
- We will need developer to install nuggets :(.
- In-river integrations were not as good as expected.
- No marketing automation or user analytics included
Yes - Updating Episerver for dev is easy, with little or no downtime at all.
It is our main CMS system across the organization. We are currently moving all of our old websites to our new Episerver CMS platform.
- User friendly
- Customizable (with the help of developers from our partner agency)
- We experience performance issues from time to time.
- It can be a bit tricky sometimes to manage multiple languages (without anyone breaking anything), but that might be our implementation.
- The translation function (Projects) could be improved.
June 11, 2020
We use Episerver as the host for our primary marketing website. We Self-Hosted, moved to DXC Cloud service offering and now back to Self-Hosting.
- Site tree navigation
- Developer ramp up time
- Ease of deployment
- Antiquated .Net technology
- Headless documentation is limiting
- Cloud offering not as strong as self hosting
- Company focus on addons vs product improvement
Yes - Upgrading from a 2 year old version to current 2 years ago was pretty much a re-write. Ongoing upgrades have been flawless and occur on every deployment.
We use Episerver CMS for all our web platforms. It helps us to reach out with information to the citizens of Stockholm. It is easy to build available pages with Episerver CMS.
- Building structures
- Manage images
- It makes the content intuitive for the user
- Easy for an editor to work with
- Would be nice if we were able to insert our own help texts into the Administration interface (to help our editors)
- Users should be able to comment on pages
- Would be nice with a built-in feature for managing maps
June 11, 2020
It maintains 75% of our company websites with the plan to convert all the websites to Episerver. It is being used by our Marketing and Merchandising departments.
- Ease and ability to make changes to Website content.
- Easy to maintain.
- Non-technical staff are able to understand the how the website is configured.
- A better explanation of Security/Permissions for Functions. It was a trial by fire to determine which area each Permission controlled. I had to create a spreadsheet turn off and on specific areas and document what was taken away as access. It was very time-consuming.
- Speaking of permissions for functions, the design could be better. The EDIT button does not align properly to the given permission.
We use Episerver CMS for both our external CMS-based systems and also for our Intranet. The system is used by all our editors in different departments. We also have a close relationship to our development department that builds our CMS-solutions and integrations.
- The GUI for Editors
- The possibility to customize functionality and user interface
- The flexibility to use Episerver in own Azure environment is not supported so well
January 06, 2020
Episerver CMS is used across the whole organization but is mainly managed by my department - the communications department. Our entire website is run through Episerver, and each department is responsible for keeping their part of the website updated with current information, as far as making small edits (like text edits). Then the communications department oversees all of those changes and is in charge of making more involved updates (adding entirely new content, creating new pages, moving things around, etc).
- Allows many different "users" with varying levels of editing access.
- Easy to see what recent changes have been made and who made them.
- The website, including the editing portion, seems to be down quite often - so that we cannot make changes - or it allows us to make changes but then doesn't properly save them.
- Customer service and user support is lacking. We've reported problems to them, yet it never seems to get fixed.
We use Episerver for our webbpage. We work on 5 different markets and sell to both b2b and b2c and Episerver CMS is perfect for this purpose.
It’s mainly our marketing department that works in the platform. But in some cases we also have a customer service rep that makes changes inside Episerver. Also, the marketing agency works inside Episerver.
- Easy to understand
- Great plugins and tools
- Good preview-mode.
- Better dashboard and statistic
- Better translation tool without plugins.
- More customizable workspace
May 28, 2019
Episerver Web Content Management System is used by our organization to manage content on our public facing website. It is used across the whole organization, with users in each department that has a public facing web page trained on updating content in the system. It assures that the public is aware of relevant information on the website.
- Easy-to-use interface
- Permissions setup
- Back-end website map
- Internal link mapping
- Mobile editing
- Email notifications
As a partner, we often recommend Episerver to our clients or prospects. I've been involved with numerous large scale implementations to date.
- Ease of use for content editors
- Speed to market (easier to implement than many other alternative platforms)
- Decent extensibility
- Documentation quality is inconsistent. Ranges from detailed to non-existent, depending on the topic.
- Publishing between multiple environments requires some nasty workarounds. Export/import tool doesn't work great. Anonymous project preview had to be custom built. Etc.
- Caching is simple to use with the out of the box set up, but customizing/extending it can be tricky.
October 06, 2017
I have worked with Episerver CMS for the past 2.5 years as my primary function as a software engineer and can honestly say I have been very satisfied with it overall. There are a few minor complaints that I will get to. But I find that compared to its other competitors it is architected very well. And really there's not much to critique there, other than a few nuances that can be worked around. However, I do feel that from the content editor section visually could use some work. The styles look very outdated and I think this failure in presentation is holding back some of the company's growth. I have also experienced some performance issues occasionally but this could have been related to other non-architectural reasons. Overall I am very pleased with EPiServer and would recommend it over anything else I've worked with in the market right now.
- Well-architected
- Useful content structure
- A blank canvas allowing total development freedom
- Outdated style/theme of content editor
- Potential performance issues (possibly related to legacy framework)
November 11, 2015
We use Ektron CMS400 for our organization's public-facing web site. It it used across the entire organization. Sometimes we use it for limited B2B and intranet purposes. As a smaller institution of higher education, financial resources are always a concern. Ektron CMS400 provides a wealth of power, flexibility, and features for an affordable price vs. the competition. Great bang for the buck. It addresses our business need for a central web content management system, including versioning, workflow, and permissions.
- From a developer perspective, Ektron CMS400 is powerful and flexible. All the features and functionality of the system are accessible to the developer through a well documented API.
- The system has had great backwards compatibility through numerous upgrade cycles. Security patches have been problem-free.
- Ektron CMS400 is great for working with structured data. I feel this is a key strength. It is simple to build smart forms for authoring content with structured data. The data is then available in XML format as individual items or collections of items, and may be displayed or applied as desired.
- The evolution of the product has focused on architecture and functionality that is of value in large distributed installations, but less so for smaller 1 or 2 server implementations.
- Development of the back end authoring and administrative interface has lagged. It has received a cosmetic face lift over the years, but has received little attention in regards to ease-of-use and usability. To some degree, it has poor discoverability with many idiosyncratic UI conventions.
- Our authors complain about learning and retaining the knowledge for using the authoring interface. In Ektron's usage model, it is a skilled role. We would prefer the authoring be more intuitive. I don't feel Ektron necessarily lags behind the competition in this area, but there is lots of room for improvement and differentiation here if they chose to make this a priority.
December 23, 2015
The Ektron CMS is being used by the website stake holders. As most know who work in a corporate setting, the company website is managed by Marketing. The so-called business problem the CMS addresses is the elusive, “we would like to update content on the site ourselves…” syndrome that many website owners/managers suffer from. The theory is that a CMS will eliminate the expense and often times – several days or more lead time that a busy web master may require to add or change content. After all if that one word in the third paragraph of a product description isn’t bolded immediately the universe will end, therefore causing the company to go under.
- The main strength of the Ektron CMS is that yes indeed, after very expensive training, non-technical users will be able to add and update website content.
- Ektron makes it easy to manage users and content once you become an expert at it after extensive and costly training plus plenty of experience using it day to day.
- The CMS is built on the .NET Framework therefore easy to modify and extend by an experienced asp.net developer. After training of course. There is also plenty of free code contributed by other developers – some may actually be useful for your particular situation.
- The first and greatest weakness is the price. More accurately the over-price. Software that requires a hard sell by a sales person is universally expensive. Ektron doesn’t have prices published on its website. Everything is simply "contact us for more information".
- Unless you have monster servers even for a low traffic site, the bloated Ektron software will be obvious by the slow page loads.
- The only CMS worse than Ektron is SiteCore.
July 17, 2015
Ektron CMS is used by our IT and Marketing Departments to provide a content management system for our website, www.wintergreenresort.com. We needed a content management system that would allow the marketing department to make daily updates to the website quickly and easily on their own without involving IT. Our Marketing Department loves Ektron CMS because it enables them to do just that. As the web developer, I am responsible for installing and configuring Ektron, setting up the site synchronizations, and overall technical support. In the five years that we have been using Ektron CMS, I can say that the product has been robust and reliable. Our site is fast and reliable, and updates to it can be easily made by non-technical people. What's not to love about Ektron CMS!
- Ektron CMS is reliable and performs well. Outages are extremely rare, and the site is fast.
- The Ektron CMS content editor is easy to use, and updates can be made by non-technical people. The Ektron site synchronization process allows us to automatically publish updates every 30 minutes. This is very important to the resort's marketing efforts during the busy ski season.
- This is straight from the marketing department: 'Ektron CMS is user friendly for non-technical people, and it allows us to be more effective in our marketing efforts.
- It is difficult to apply custom css styles to Ektron server controls.
- The product documentation can be confusing.
- The annual licensing fee is reasonable, but the start up cost is high, and some of the other resorts balk at the high price tag.
July 07, 2015
For those clients that we've worked with, EPiServer is primarily being leveraged by an organization's Communication/Marketing Department as owners of the system (and then supported by Experis or internal IT staff). The immediate pain points that it has been able to address is the ability to manage the publication of content and new pages without having to rely on other resources bandwidth for assistance.
- Innovation - EPiServer is constantly looking at ways to improve their product and partner with organizations that can develop add-ons to improve the overall features of the core platform. For Example: SilverPop (marketing automation) and Celum (digital asset management).
- Content Management - It may seem obvious that a WCM product should manage content/reuse well; but, let's be honest, not all products do what they claim to do well. In this case, EPiServer understands the core functionality and has created product that is intuitive and exceeds customer expectations in this area.
- Previews - EPiServer has built-in templates (emulators) that allow you to easily confirm how your content is going to be displayed on a variety of devices before you publish your content. This is advantageous as it eliminates the guess work and need to redo content (or even code) after you've gone to production because you weren't able to thoroughly test it before hand.
- Translations - When we first started to work with the product, the platform was missing the basic ability to export/import XLIFF for translation companies to leverage; and, it relied on developers that had created an Open Source module called "Translate X". The module was buggy, version specific and had little to no documentation. Since then, EPiServer has partnered with other software/translation companies (IE: Translations.com) to improve this experience; however, I believe that there is still room for improvement and other options.
- North America User Conference - Adoption for EPiServer is growing in NA; and, there are more partners than before willing to help with your specific implementation. One of the things that I would like to see is an annual conference where the community can come together, publicly discuss their pain points, success stories, conduct demos, talk about the product road map, etc; and, would be similar to what other competitors (such as Sitecore & Ektron) do.
December 22, 2018
I have worked with Episerver for quite some time now and I (or future client of ours) couldn't be happier with the tool. Having also looked into its competition and trying it out for bandwidth etc., Episerver CMS stands out the best.
It is being used only on my system right now, but I am trying to go full fledged on recommending this portal to our sister companies and others. The software has been designed very neatly and the content editor section of the tool can get a little better than the current look. But all in all, it has been a far better experience when compared to others.
- The content management framework has been built very nicely and it completely stands up to the promise that it makes of being the best in the market. Not that I've tried all of the other products, but choices ruin decision making and I'm sticking to this one.
- They are constantly working towards bettering themselves and that's the promise I need from my content management platform company. Reiterate and improvise.
- APIs are one of my greatest accomplishments that this product has as they are extensively available and are very developer friendly.
- We had a little bit of an inconvenience with the User Interface content display of some of the pages on the portal, but we're sure that will be taken care of in the near future.
- Actual implementation for out of the box product test drive was a little time-consuming. With the help of the support team, it was all good. Would be good if we wouldn't need to contact anyone in the future though.
- Documentation could be better.
September 30, 2015
We use Ektron for our main website as a content publishing tool which integrats with our enrollment system as weel as course and programs catalog. In addition we use Ektron's smart form to develop online applications.it functions as a document repository for digital assets for public access, customer and internal access. Ektron has proven to be a rebost tool for editing and updating online content as well as providing an easy to use publishing workflow.
- Ektron smart orm is a very powerful and easy to use tool which can be updated by content editors and leveraged by developers using XSLT or code behind classes
- Ektron Framework API provides developers with the right tools to extend and enrich the website's functionality.
- Publishing workflow Ektron's publishing and approval workflows allow multiple content editors to easily collaborate on updating a single content item in tandem. Site administrator to create approval workflows which integrate with the organization's business logic and hierarchy.
- eSync Tool Ektron's eSync tool allows for synchronization of content and application files of multiple environments, making migration of changes a seamless process.
- Subdomains - Native support for multiple subdomains under one Ektron site
September 30, 2015
We implemented EPiServer to manage our public-facing B2B website. During our website redesign, we integrated our new design and HTML into the system, and additionally integrated the CMS with our marketing automation/email software so that we could use data from that engine within the personalization features that EPiServer offers. It is still in use today primarily by members of the marketing department to make updates to page content or add/remove pages.
- The personalization engine is, from my perspective, one of the primary reasons to choose EPiServer. It works really well, and allows you to make some sophisticated, targeted marketing choices.
- EPiServer also is very developer-friendly, with an extensive and flexible API set.
- Honestly the biggest challenge we had was not with the product but with the EPiServer sales team and implementation partners. At the time at least, their sales reps just didn't seem all that interested in making a sale! It took forever and felt like a sluggish process. Additionally, they would not let us independently evaluate their implementation partners, but pushed us to work with one particular partner. We started the project with this partner but for various reasons having mostly to do with their account management capabilities and the chemistry between us, the project imploded and we had to start all over again with another partner. This setback in our timeline could have been avoided if we'd been given the option of evaluating/communicating with a few partners and making our own selection that was best for our team.
September 30, 2015
Ektron CMS serves as the platform for seven of the organization's websites. The sites include a main, general organization identity website, and six smaller sites that support annual events and special interest campaigns. Sites are administered and updated by marketing staff, and a few other line department staff within the organization. The organization adopted Ektron CMS (at version 4) because it was cost-effective, and relatively easy to set up and manage.
- The system has been very stable and dependable - up-time has been nearly 100%.
- Content editing is relatively simple and flexible, and it's easy to include images and video in page layouts.
- In user management, security and permissions are flexible and easy to administer. Content approval chains are simple to set up.
- The system includes advanced features such as manual or rule-based content aliasing, widget-based page layout, blogging, content rating, and integrated analytics.
- Ektron support staff are prompt and helpful when we encounter problems. Unlimited support is offered to licensees.
- The system integrates seamlessly with our organization's customer management system for e-commerce.
- Content editing has become challenging as new browser versions are released. Some operations of the content editor in v8.6 are unstable with recent versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome, and can cause loss of work if the user is not careful. We hope this will be addressed in the next upgrade. Only other option would be to lock down browser upgrades in our shop, but that doesn't seem safe.
- The upgrade process has become more difficult with each new version. We used to perform upgrades and any needed cleanup in-house, but Ektron now recommends having this work done by a partner re-seller, adding significant cost.
- Site search was based on index-server until v8.0. It was simple to set up, very reliable and met all our needs. Newer versions are much more complex to setup and require more resources.
July 07, 2015
We use EPiServer to manage the content on our corporate website across multiple languages. It is used mostly by the marketing department with support from internal development. The plan is to eventually roll it out to other departments to manage their content in the future. It has allowed us to offload content updates from the development team onto the content creation teams. Technical knowledge is no longer a requirement to manage the website.
- Translation/localization support
- Workflow management
- Flexibility
- Deployment (when using a test environment)
- Reporting
- CMO across external sites
EPiServer is used by many of our clients and also by our marketing team to manage some of our web properties. We are also in the process of converting our primary website onto the EPiServer platform.
- Enterprise e-commerce
- Targeted Content
- Streamlined CMS Editor Experience
- Site speed performance
- Multi-channel distribution
- A stronger multi-tier content synchronization tool
- Better documentation
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)?
The Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud CMS, integrating and superseding features from the former Ektron CMS) is a web content management system and digital marketing suite. It enables editors to drag-and-drop content to quickly create new digital experiences that are automatically responsive.
The vendor's value proposition is that the Optimizely Episerver Content Cloud enables users to easily manage content and marketing campaigns in one screen. This solution also enables users to personalize content according to personas, segments or individual users.
Categories: Headless CMS, Content Management
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Screenshots
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Videos (3)
Watch Lindblad Expeditions: Brining the expedition experience to your fingertips
Watch Janome: Growing a digital community of sewists one stitch at a time
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Downloadables
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Integrations
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce.com, Marketo, inRiver PIM, Aprimo, Oracle CX Marketing (formerly Oracle Marketing Cloud), Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation), Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM), Digizuite, Translations.com
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Competitors
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
- Entry-level set up fee?Optional
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 0% | |
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 0% | |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 62% | |
| Enterprises (> 500 employees) | 38% |
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Social Media | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar | ||
| Phone | ||
| Live Chat | ||
Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows |
| Mobile Application: | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)'s top competitors?
Sitecore Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, and Acquia Digital Experience Platform are common alternatives for Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud).
What is Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)'s best feature?
Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions highest, with a score of 7.7.
Who uses Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)?
The most common users of Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) are from Mid-size Companies and the Information Technology & Services industry.